Most global businesses focus nearly all their efforts on selling to the wealthiest 14% of the world's population. It's getting harder and harder to make a profit that way: these markets are oversaturated, overcompetitive, and declining. The Invisible Market shows how you can unleash new growth and profitability by serving the other 86%. Drawing on his unsurpassed insights into marketing in emerging markets, Vihajan Mahajan offers detailed strategies and implementation techniques for product design, pricing, packaging, distribution, advertising, and more. You'll discover radically different 'rules of engagement' that make emerging markets tick, and how European and Asian companies are already driving billions of dollars in sales there. Mahajan shows how to understand and manage lack of infrastructure and media, low literacy levels, and 'unconventional' consumer behaviour.

Vijay Mahajan, former dean of the Indian School of Business, holds the John P. Harbin Centennial Chair in Business at McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin.

The 86 Percent Solution The 86 Percent Solution How to Succeed in the Biggest Market Opportunity of the Next 50 Years Preface: Do You Want to Be in This Market? Can You Afford Not to Be?Managers at a major U.S. office equipment manufacturer were considering how to market an overhead projector to the developing world when we asked a simple question: How would the overhead projector work without electricity? There was silence. It was a question that they had never even considered. But this is a question that must be answered every day in the developing world. By asking and answering this type of question, Hewlett-Packard has created battery-operated digital cameras and printing systems that allow entrepreneurial photographers to operate completely off the grid. Ask yourself: Do you know what an inverter is? If you don't, you probably haven't thought enough about the weak infrastructure and other distinctive conditions of emerging markets. These differences, and the strategies needed to address them, are the focus of this book.To appreciate the complexities of these markets and solutions designed to meet their needs, consider the toilet. China is now second only to the U.S. in web users. It is expected to have more broadband and mobile-phone users than any other nation by 2006. Yet more than 60 percent of Chinese citizens do not have access to proper sanitation. This means about 700 million people in China (along with another 700 million in India) do not have a basic toilet. Think about that. Researchers at MIT's Media Lab are creating wearable computers, but wouldn't a computer built into a toilet be a more appropriate solution for the developing world? The airport in Frankfort, Germany has toilets that automatically clean their seats and flush themselves. South Korea, as the logical outcome of a national obsession with technology, has set a goal of having 10 million "smart homes" online by 2007, including toilets that relay body temperature, pulse rates, and urinalysis results to your doctor. Yet a market of more than a billion people has gone virtually unmet. Where are the innovations focused on the parts of the world that lack sanitation?This is not about altruism. In creating solutions for the developing world, companies can solve one of the most pressing problems facing them today: sustaining growth. IBM's Global CEO Study in 2004 found that four out of five CEOs believe that revenue growth is the most important path to boosting financial performance. 1 Where will this growth come from? With the largest populations and fastest growth rates on the planet, developing markets represent the future of the global economy. To seize the opportunities of these 86 percent markets, we need different mind-sets and market strategies. We need managers who can envision creating a business selling sachets of shampoo for pennies, distributing products in stores the size of phone booths, or offering credit cards to people whose idea of banking is storing rolls of coins in a money belt. As you will see in the following pages, the creative companies that serve these markets are willing to provide refrigeration along with their bottles of cola and design cars that are modeled after bullock carts. They can sell a product to a customer in California that is picked up by a relative in Mexico City. In short, they have used a distinctive set of market strategies to recognize and realize the opportunities of these 86 percent markets.This book is designed to challenge the thinking of managers from developed markets about strategies that have worked well in the past. Managers in developing countries will find some new insights from different parts of the developing world that will very likely work in their region. En